Colonies and their Uses

By Cherub bobT

Okay, so that's really all there is new to creating colonies. I know this is brief, but as long as you are familiar with parent creation, colonies should be an easy adaptation. If you follow the brief and simple rules I laid out, you will end up with a great looking and playable colony.

In closing I want to explain one part of the editor that many many people have posted about. The order of episodes within the editor itself. The top portion of the editor is setup for the parent city episodes. The bottom is set up for your colonies. However, in the top portion, people tend to get confused with the center column. In this column is the list of what episode will be played next, (after the current PARENT episode). All adventures start with a Parent episode, and all adventures end with a Parent (victory episode). These two episodes must be present in every adventure you create. For some time now I have been beating my head up against the wall trying to figure out how best to explain this to adventure creators. What I finally came up with for a simple solution was this. Each episode setting you have listed in the top is a parent episode. So if you have one colony set in the top choices you just add one to your total number of episodes. If you have two add two, and so on. If you want to go to a colony right after the first ep. You must set the first button to colony (not Parent) Remember we always start at parent. If you want to go to another colony right after your return home, you must set the second button to colony (remember we always return to parent from colony). So if I were to explain it a little more lets use the following guide.

You want to build an adventure with 9 episodes. Three of those episodes will be colonies and you have made up the maps for all. The progression you have decided upon is ..Parent, Parent, Colony, Parent, Colony, Parent, Parent, Colony, Victory. In the editor your center column will be set up as follows.

Parent

Colony

Colony

Parent

Colony

Victory

In the bottom you have your three Colony settings. You have listed 6 parent episodes, and within those, three have been labeled colony. Add those two numbers together to get your 9-episode adventure..